In the still winter air of a quiet Dutch village, the scenes of violence and war being described to me seem barely believable.

In gentle tones, an elderly man is telling me about the last moments of my great-uncle's life. As I listen, the story of a country boy from NSW who joined the Royal Air Force and sought adventure over the skies of Europe comes into sometimes unsettling focus.

''The plane tried to make a crash landing, but a bullet hit the petrol tank and it exploded above our village. Debris and bodies went everywhere,'' 89-year-old Philip Timmerman tells me. ''That is where your uncle landed,'' he says, pointing to what is now a parking space outside a neat row of houses with well-manicured lawns.

Buzo's great-uncle, Flying Officer Thomas Eric Charles.

Timmerman is describing what he saw on the night of January 30, 1944, as we sit in a car just outside the small fishing village of Kolhorn in the north of the Netherlands, population 690.

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''I could see he had tried to deploy his parachute, but the cord was burnt through. His body made a dent in the ground from the impact of the fall, but he was still completely intact. Just the front of his hair was burned. He had red hair, didn't he?''

I don't know - I have only ever seen black-and-white photos of my great-uncle Eric. It could have been red. These minute details are becoming discomforting, inviting me into a story that had always seemed like a myth.

What was my great-uncle thinking that night? That sooner or later it would have come to this, as it had for so many other aircrews? Was he scared? Was he calm?

Did he have time to wish he'd never left his home in Sebastopol, in the Riverina district, for this war in Europe? Or was it all a great, heroic adventure for a young farmer, described by all who knew him as full of life?

Eric volunteered for an RAF Pathfinder squadron. Its task was to go ahead and light the target for the following bombers.

The casualty rate was horrendous. Of the 156,000 aircrew who served in Bomber Command, 56,000 were killed.

My family has been making the pilgrimage to Kolhorn since 1948, when my grandmother came to visit the grave of her brother. She died five years ago. Out of duty to her, I am visiting the grave of a man I never knew.

She had once shown me the telegram informing the family of his death. ''He went away, and then one day, you get a letter saying that he's gone,'' she had told me, flatly.

As far as she could know, her brother was left among the hostilities, far away from his family, surrounded by foreigners to whom he was just another war casualty.

This is why we travel to Kolhorn.

My mother had recently discovered a village historian, Nicolas Visser, who had taken an interest in the seven war graves in the local cemetery. I contacted him before my visit and he offered to host me with Timmerman.

Visser pulled some photos out of a plastic sleeve.

''This is the man who shot down your uncle's plane, Master Sergeant Heinz Vinke. He was killed a month later, when his plane crashed in the English Channel on the 26th of February, 1944,'' he says, handing me the photo of a man in the grey Luftwaffe uniform.

I had never thought of the face of the man responsible for shooting down Eric's plane or what might have happened to him, but there he was. ''And here is a photo of the plane wreck,'' Visser said. ''The woman is the daughter of the farmer whose property most of the wreck landed on.''

At the grave site, Visser has brought a posy of flowers for me to place on the grave. To my surprise and delight, they include a waratah.

Three of the headstones belong to Australians: Flying Officer N.C. Law, Flight Lieutenant R.P. Wishart and Flying Officer Thomas Eric Charles. The other four were British, the youngest aged just 18.

The sharp cold of northern Holland is a stark reminder that we are far from Australia. My uncle had grown up on a NSW farm, an only son. He played cricket with his four sisters and slept on the verandah on hot summer nights. He would have never seen snow before going to Europe and now he spends all winter blanketed in it.

''Do the other families come to visit?'' I ask.

''Only one family. We've tried to contact the others, but we cannot get the private information from the RAF and RAAF,'' Visser replies.

They take me to the site of the crash, a field of thick, green grass next to a farmhouse.

''The Lancaster took off from the RAF base at Bourn at 17.15 hours,'' he says. ''It was one of a force containing 534 aircraft - 440 Lancasters, 82 Halifaxes and 12 Mosquitoes.

''The mission was to bomb Berlin, targeting the city centre and the south-western quarter. They say at least 1000 people died. Thirty-three aircraft were lost in the mission, or 6.2 per cent of the force.''

Timmerman then begins his part of the story, which he witnessed as he was walking his girlfriend home late that night.

''The Nazis left the bodies in the streets for two days to scare us,'' he says. ''I will never forget that night, not as long as I live.''

His voice cracks as he speaks. He is 89 years old, talking about events that happened 68 years earlier, but the emotion is raw and the memory is fresh.

Timmerman and I come from different generations and different continents; we speak different languages and have lived vastly different lives.

But Thomas Eric Charles is a part of both our histories.

We retreat from the cold to a cafe, and over a piece of apple pie I probe Timmerman for stories of his own experience under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

''I was here when they came and took the Jews away,'' he says. ''Anyone caught hiding them was shot.

''They were sending all the young boys to labour camps to work, so I hid in a barn for three years.

''When the Nazis came looking, I would hide in a trapdoor under a haystack. I was arrested three times, but I always escaped. Once I had to leap off a train.''

Timmerman was in his 20s during the war, as were my great-uncle and my grandmother.

The only thing that feels right for me to do now, as a 26-year-old, is to listen to the stories, and to remember them.

When we say goodbye, Timmerman and Visser thank me profusely for my interest, while I feel greatly indebted to them.

Meeting them allows my family and me the comfort of knowing Eric was not buried among strangers to whom his death was meaningless.

Now, 68 years later, they know his name, they know where he came from and they know the colour of his hair.